Were it 2009 or 2010, you may very well have found Theatre [502] artistic directors Gil Reyes, Amy Attaway, and Mike Brooks huddled alone in a dark corner of a bar on a Friday night drinking pale ales and feverishly trading “what ifs?” and “why nots?” in hushed tones. But it’s 2012. And sitting at the Bluegrass Brewing Company on Main Street, just down the block from Actors Theatre of Louisville, the gulf of change is readily apparent. They’re anything but quiet and they’re now surrounded by a boisterous band of friends.
Theatre [502] began with the simple notion that Louisville needed a theater company that was at once recent and relevant, exciting and nimble. It has backed up its intent with a self-described obsession for quality and a continued effort to bring the national conversation to town.
“The shows that we’re doing are challenging shows,” said Brooks. “They’re complex stories to tell, told in interesting ways. I think it just gives everybody a chance to find out if they’re as good as they want to be. And it feels so exciting.”
Directed by Reyes and starring Brooks, alongside actress Leah Roberts, playwright Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries” has just completed its second to last performance on this Friday night in August. Tonight, as with every other night, Theatre [502] has invited its audience out for drinks afterward. These nightly libations weren’t originally part of the plan, but have nonetheless become an established tradition and are illuminatingly demonstrative of the company’s stated philosophy of providing unprecedented access and ownership for its audience.
“It’s about them and how they receive this work and what this work makes them think about themselves and their own experiences,” said Brooks. “That’s what’s at the heart of what we do. Theater shouldn’t be presentation. It’s not a dance. It’s trying to unlock something within the people watching you.”
Now more than halfway through their second season, after beginning in June with playwright Jordan Harrison’s “Futura,” as directed by Attaway, the Theatre [502] trio and fellow collaborators are eagerly mingling through an impressively age-diverse crowd. There’s talk of the Olympics, of whether to go with the India pale ale or the summer wheat, and yes, of the play itself.
“Sometimes it’s a not a very in-depth conversation, but sometimes they just want to talk about the play a little bit,” said Reyes. “They want to talk about what they’ve seen. And we want to do that as artists because I think it’s useful to both of us. And it helps them understand our overall goal and aesthetic a little bit better.”
As happy as they appear when surrounded by peers and patrons alike, it’s when the three are finally reunited at a single table that their back-and-forth sentence finishing, effortless chatter, and near-constant giddiness resumes in full force. It is a self-evident and caring professional and personal relationship first forged by years of shared productions, then by a realization of mutual vision, and now by the joint creative endeavor that is Theatre [502]. Reyes, Attaway, and Brooks view their ongoing rapport as an invaluable asset.
“We like each other, OK?” said Attaway.
Quick to point out that a theater company with three co-artistic directors isn’t exactly common, Attaway implied that it might just be this relationship that makes it possible.
“A question that people ask us a lot is, ‘What does it mean to have three artistic directors? How do we do that? How do we make decisions?’” said Attaway. “And, honestly, that’s a question that I would have asked another company with three artistic directors. But I will say that it’s been amazingly smooth. And it’s because we honestly and deeply and truly respect each other. So there never is a point where I really disagree with what [Brooks] has to say and he’s wrong and I’m right. If I really disagree with what [Brooks] has to say then I’m really interested in what [Brooks] has to say because maybe he’s right.”
“I’ve found the cross-chatter so important to growing as a director,” said Reyes. “In the two shows that I’ve done so far, having [Attaway and Brooks] come in and give me notes on ‘Gruesome Playground Injuries’ at the beginning, middle, and end of the process has really, really fed me. And, similarly, directing another director challenges my directing brain to know how to communicate with you [Brooks]. Even though you’ve acted a long time and I’ve directed you before, you haven’t been doing it for a while. So it was like I had one language with [Roberts] and another language with you. But it was fun. It was neat to be able to do that.”
Theatre [502] was founded with a certain aesthetic and a very specific niche in mind, but the exact contours of what that means are continuing to evolve as the directors, artists, and audience help to chisel away at exactly what type of productions fit most snugly within the creative mode of the company and the Louisville scene at large.
“I think, after a year and a half of producing, we’ve learned a little more about how our community is going to respond to these plays,” said Attaway. “We thought there was this niche between the Humana Festival and what the other small companies were doing. We were pretty sure that that niche existed. And we found out from last season that it did exist, that we found it. And now we’re working on defining exactly what that niche is, exactly what are the plays that fit there, that aren’t going to be Actors Theatre plays, that aren’t going to be [The Bunbury Theatre] plays or whatever, but that are our plays that our people want to see.”
“We’re sculpting an aesthetic,” said Brooks. “We have this block of probably 50 or 60 shows that we’ve read since we started doing season planning the first time. And it’s just kind of like, ‘Well, maybe not that one. Maybe not this one just this time.’ And, together with our audiences, I think we really are developing a statement of aesthetic.”
And Brooks couldn’t be happier that there’s a place for his own directorial contribution – “The Aliens” – in that aesthetic. Written by Annie Baker and premiering Oct. 5, “The Aliens” will be the season’s third and final production.
“This show – I have been in love with this show for so long,” said Brooks. “[It is] difficult to talk about but easy to love. The characters are so human. I love theater that I think functions kind of anthropologically. I use the word ‘humans’ probably more often than most other humans. But I love to think about us as these evolving creatures. And I think this play speaks really deeply to us trying to cope with a world that we were never built to understand and function in. Things have changed so quickly in our expectations of ourselves and others. And our relationships have changed so much, so quickly, that it’s surprising to me when we don’t feel alienated from each other, when we can make connection. And this is what this show, ultimately, is about.”
The opportunity to develop and maintain a continued line of conversation with a dedicated audience was a central intent from Day 1, but it’s led to a few surprises.
“A little tiny microcosm of that is with this play, now that it’s super successful and getting amazing reviews,” said Attaway. “[Reyes] directed it and [Brooks] is in it. And people keep coming up to me and saying, ‘Congratulations.’ And at first my response to that was, ‘Well, I didn’t do anything. I think I might have handed them the play to read, but that’s it. I didn’t do anything. Congratulate them.’ But now, after several weeks of this happening, I feel like, no, this is our project. And this is something that we’ve come to work together to build. And people have come to respect this high quality from us. So yeah, we’re a team here.”
“And when you say ‘we,’ that’s a big ‘we,’” said Brooks.
Theatre [502] estimates it worked with up to 70 different artists in last year’s first season alone, and has expanded to maintaining a number of dedicated positions for this year’s outings, including a technical director, production stage manager, lighting and sound designers, graphic designer, and social media coordinator.
“And that was so humbling,” said Brooks. “And I hate to even use that word because it’s insufficient to describe what it felt like to know that we had made a home for that big of a family. And it feels really fucking good.”
“We have been very fortunate that we have found collaborators who really want to work with us, who are excited by what we’re trying to do enough to work their own asses off to make it happen,” said Attaway. “We feel like the best actors in town, the best designers in town, have sought us out. I think we’ve been lucky.”
“And they bought in on that mission too,” said Reyes. “They recognize that it is something worth bringing to Louisville.”
Looking toward the coming years, Theatre [502] is seeking to future-proof and has begun to have the earliest conversations about things like forming a board, but is doing so with cautious regard to the interesting paradox in which they find themselves.
“Right before we launched, [Reyes] had a conversation,” said Brooks. “It was a public conversation with Jon Jory, who was the longtime artistic director at Actors Theatre. [Reyes] was just kind of facilitating a talk there. And Jory talked…very deliberately about how big you want to be. Because once you grow past a certain point, you can do more in a way, but you also must do less in a way. Once you become an institution, you can’t take the kind of risks that you can when you’re still guerilla theater.”
Already eyeing a stack of 30 potential scripts for next season, and with the first formal reading committee meeting scheduled in the coming weeks, the company plans on maintaining a slate of three primary productions for 2013, but also bringing something new in the form of the Small Batch Series.
“We want to give our artists a more direct line to producing their own ideas and weighing in, taking ownership of projects,” said Reyes. “So…we’re going to try out some other things of all kinds. And we’re calling it the Small Batch Series. It may be three shows, it may be two shows, it may be a reading.”
According to Reyes, a reading of Eric Pfeffinger’s play, “Accidental Rapture,” about the end of the world, is a probable inclusion in the Small Batch Series.
“We’re going to try to do that around the end of the Mayan calendar,” said Reyes. “Hopefully we’ll get it in before the rapture comes.”
And then there’s November’s Slant Culture Series, in partnership with Walden Theatre, Savage Rose Theatre, Louisville Improvisors, and Le Petomane, for which Theatre [502] plans to remount its first ever production, “The Debate Over Courtney O’Connell of Columbus, Nebraska” by Mat Smart.
Consistently focused on expanding its base, the company is looking forward to returning to a multiple-venue format for its third season, after presenting the entirety of the current season at Actors Theatre’s Victor Jory Theatre. In its first season, Theatre [502] presented a production of Marco Ramirez’s heavy metal play “Broadsword” at the Iroquois Amphitheater.
“We saw so many people that we didn’t recognize, so many people from that neighborhood, so many people from the South End who just came to see the show,” said Attaway. “It was this beautiful combination of the fact that we were in the South End and that the play was about heavy metal music. And so it brought out a lot of nontraditional theater-goers. And that was amazing.”
Attaway and her co-artistic directors want to continue bringing in new audiences as well as old. And Theatre [502] wants to continue filling a niche in Louisville’s theater-going culture.
“We’ve been so gratified by the ripples so far,” said Attaway. “We want bigger ripples.”
There’s a scene in director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 film “The Dark Knight” in which the late Heath Ledger’s character, the Joker, said, “This town deserves a better class of criminal. And I’m gonna give it to ‘em.” I suspect it’s a sentiment the folks at Theatre [502] would well understand.
-Chris Ritter
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